Privacy

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Privacy has become one of the defining issue of the Information Age. CIS has received national recognition for its interdisciplinary and multi-angle examination of privacy, particularly as it relates to emerging technology.

Albert Gidari is the Director of Privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. He was a partner for over 20 years at Perkins Coie LLP, achieving a top-ranking in privacy law by Chambers. He negotiated the first-ever "privacy by design" consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission on behalf of Google, which required the establishment of a comprehensive privacy program including third party compliance audits. Mr.

Jennifer Stisa Granick was the Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. She is the author of a new book from Cambridge University Press entitled American Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, and What To Do About It. From 2001 to 2007, Granick was Executive Director of CIS and taught Cyberlaw, Computer Crime Law, Internet intermediary liability, and Internet law and policy. From 2007 to 2010 she served as the Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Norberto Andrade is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow scholar at UC Berkeley School of Law, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT), and a Fellow at the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL, The Netherlands). He has worked as a Scientific Officer at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, and as a legal expert in the field of telecommunications at the Portuguese Regulatory Authority for Communications (ANACOM).

Charles Belle is the founder and Executive Director of Startup Policy Lab, a new nonprofit think tank dedicated to connecting policymakers and the startup community. Examining public policy at the nexus of startups and technology, Charles' research is currently focused on privacy and how to support local government open data initiatives while simultaneously protecting citizen privacy.

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The FBI demand for access to a locked iPhone by compelling Apple to write new software to undo its security features has sucked the oxygen out of the surveillance-privacy debate over the last few weeks. So much is this the case that coverage of the markup of H.R. 699, the Email Privacy Act, tentatively scheduled for March 22, seems sure to be lost in the oral argument on Apple’s case, which is scheduled to be heard the same day. But the Email Privacy Act is incredibly important and it deserves attention.

The Department of Justice (DoJ) filed its response yesterday to Apple's motion to vacate the court’s order that directed Apple to write new code and certify it to circumvent a security feature configured to prevent access to a device. Reaction to the tone and DoJ analysis was swift, and it highlights the stakes of the case for both sides.

Much consideration has been given to the role of tools in recruitment to extremist violence, the desirability of restricting the use of tools for those purposes, the collateral effects of such restrictions, and the opportunity to use tools for alternative narratives.

This blog concludes that in some cases, restrictions on such uses can be desirable. At the same time though, with few exceptions, the choice of such restrictions should be left to the private sector, and carried out in a way that advances liberal principles. Moreover, there is unlikely to be a solely technological solution to the problem of radicalization or its products, including planning of terrorist attacks. Ultimately, it may be people rather than tools, that are the most effective resource for curtailing extremist violence.

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Across California, young people in the juvenile justice system are routinely tracked 24/7 with GPS ankle monitors that are often touted as “better than jail.” That’s too low a standard for a technology used on children.

Cyberattacks are the new normal, but, when they come from abroad, they can raise panic about an invisible cyberwar. If international conflicts are unavoidable, isn’t a cyberwar better than a physical war with bombs and bullets?

Sure, cyberwar is better than a kinetic or physical war in many ways, but it could also make war worse. Unless it’s very carefully designed, a cyberattack could be a war crime.

As the “NotPetya” ransomware attack spreads around the world, it’s making clear how important it is for everyone – and particularly corporations – to take cybersecurity seriously. The companies affected by this malware include power utilities, banks and technology firms. Their customers are now left without power and other crucial services, in part because the companies did not take action and make the investments necessary to better protect themselves from these cyberattacks.

Arguing that a defendant’s conviction for website hacking should be overturned because legitimate, highly valuable security and privacy research commonly employs techniques that are essentially identical to what the defendant did and that such independent research is of great value to academics, government regulators and the public even when – often especially when — conducted without a website owner’s permission.

Arguing that the information publicly available on the NSA's Upstream program, combined with an understanding of how the Internet works, means plaintiff Wikimedia has met its burden of proving standing to challenge Upstream.

Arguing that if the court should not compel Apple to create software to enable unlocking and search of the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, it will jeopardize digital and personal security more generally.

"Companies rarely get in trouble if someone the uses personal information they sell in an unauthorized way, creating a “Wild West” where data brokers and people-search engines aren’t closely regulated, says Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland and the author of Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. “There are businesses that from low to high, small to big, that don’t care about FCRA,” Citron said. “They are scofflaws.”

"For the Echo, however, it’s more complicated. “The cost of the device is not the ultimate revenue for these companies – advertising and personal information are what's at the end of the rainbow for them,” explains Albert Gidari, the director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, in an email to the Christian Science Monitor."

"Riana Pfefferkorn -- who helped write an amicus brief on Apple's behalf (along with several other security researchers and professors) -- pointed out on Twitter that Cellebrite's hacking is exactly the sort of risk the government refused to seriously contemplate during its pursuit of an All Writs Order forcing Apple to open up the phone for the FBI."

"“First of all, black communities been knowing that we had to code our communications,” said Malkia Cyril of the Oakland-based Center for Media Justice, who has used Signal to organize Black Lives Matter actions with other activists since 2014. “We been coding our communications since slavery. The knowledge of the need is not what’s missing for us. It’s the skills and the information.”"

For 15 years there's been a heated battle over your right to privacy online -- from the Patriot Act to the Snowden revelations to the recent repeal of Internet privacy protections. What can we expect in the Trump Era? What's at stake? Who's at risk? And, most of all, what can you do to protect yourself and defend democracy in a digital world?

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Jennifer Granick talks about how notions of privacy have changed over the years and where she thinks things are headed in the future. She is a professor at the Stanford School of Law and Director of Civil Liberties at the Center for Internet and Society, where she specializes in the intersection of engineering, privacy and the law.

Last week Yahoo announced that 500 million accounts had been hacked – consumer names, email addresses, phone messages, passwords and birth dates were stolen. It is one of the biggest security breaches in history. We’re been seeing a lot more cyber attacks on companies, individuals and the government in recent years. So who is behind them and what can consumers do to protect ourselves online?

"Princeton's Arvind Narayanan and Steven Englehardt studied how all the things we do not see as users are valuable to someone on our digital trail, as our presence may be authenticated and tracked through such minutia as personalized browser settings or even our laptops' battery levels.